Comment by alexpotato
4 hours ago
If anyone is interested in what it was like fighting spam in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that captured spam, analyzed it and then passed the analysis s on to the law firms of the big email providers for targeting under CAN-SPAM.
Twitter thread about it below but happy to do a AMA here.
Ironically one of the first recognizable spam campaigns was perpetrated by lawyers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
On the flip side, the lawyers that represented the big tech firms at the time were some of the most impressive people I've ever met.
You could speak to them as a peer when it came to technical issues or system architecture AND they were experts in technology law. Especially impressive given that anti-spam was still in it's infancy and rapidly evolving.
It's the same scaling issue we've had since the advent of the internet, and why spam and social media became such a dumpster fire. There are many things in life that are perfectly fine when uncommon / rare, but are disastrous when done cheaply at scale.